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The Prayer of Faith – Mark 11:24

“Therefore, I tell you, whatever you ask in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours.” A Bible teacher once told me that for some people (Christians) faith is like this: if you believe God can and you believe God will and you believe it hard enough then God has to. C.S. Lewis said the real problem with Jesus’ teaching about prayer in this verse is that He so lavishly promised that God will grant what we ask in prayer when refusal by God for what we ask in prayer is so frequent. Lewis said that we must not encourage in ourselves or others any tendency to work up to a subjective state we describe as faith with the idea that this will somehow insure the granting of our prayer. He said that the state of mind which desperate desire interacting with a strong imagination can manufacture is not faith but rather a feat of psychological gymnastics, as my Bible teacher so aptly observed. C.S. Lewis concluded that such faith occurs when the one who prays does so as God’s fellow-worker and is so united with God in particular situations that he or she can demand from God what is needed to accomplish His plans and purposes. When we pray the prayer of faith, we must be sure that we are being led by the Holy Spirit to pray in faith to accomplish God’s purposes.